SCP-2829 was my very first skip. I avoided the 'Failed First Skip' curse by just being too nervous to post, mostly, but I got a ton of feedback and all that. It was also how I learned about the Adipose from Dr. Who, incidentally.

The original concept was basically little balls of fat that make you happy but something BAD happens. I was inspired by 999 when making this, because as much as I love the concept, that article sucks. 999 is happiness personified. What's the opposite of happiness? Maybe sadness and loss. Sometimes I like the Greek tragedy kind of irony. So I decided, hey, reimagine 999. Juxtapose sadness with happiness. Zyn told me to think of a story for these things, so I did. 2829 is the story of something made to bring joy, yet only succeeding in bringing more sadness into the world. The slugs suffer because they're starving and they can't fulfill their purpose. The Foundation staff suffer to keep it as safely contained as possible. Dr. Blackbox suffers because they ate him and their intended recipient never gets them.

Why slugs? Your guess is as good as mine. I don't even particularly like slugs. I'm far too proud of the title than I have any right to be.

SCP-3031. If it wasn't for the contest, I don't think this would ever exist. Honestly, the whole thing was born out of a narcissistic desire to get myself into history through the contest. I figured if I tried and didn't quite fail, that would still be a pretty good outcome. This is the quickest I have ever (and likely will ever) pushed something from concept to draft to posted, less than two and a half weeks.haha suck it, past me

Now, on to the skip itself. I knew I had no chance in hell of winning the contest. So I went full meta alchemist and decided to write my thing on fear itself. I figured that a contest would be the only time I'd get away with something so ambitious. Parasites freak me out. The idea of something in your head that is eating your thoughts and replacing them with its own freaks me out. I knew it wouldn't be horror-y enough to win, but it seems to have done well. I like timeline-screwing in general. Yes, the iterations and note are cliche. But I like those cliches, and I think they're rather cool still.

SCP-3233 is a special skip for me, because it's A) the first skip idea I made completely wholecloth, and B) the first time I had to pull and revise something. It's the first time I actually experienced the whole "look at things in your everyday life that inspire you" method of idea coming-up-with. Anyways, long story short I was talking to a friend who works with animals, and she mentioned that for whatever reason, the animals seemed to only give birth when she was around. I never found out if this was just confirmation bias, but the idea of a person affecting animals in that way interested me. This was the same friend who told me about the existence of tenrecs; they're pretty cool animals. And since they got no representation on this site, and we need more animals that aren't cats, dogs, or birds, I figured why not.

The idea was stuck with me for a while, but last New Years Eve I had the urge to pull out my phone and write a quick rough draft on that useless Memos app. I have this thing where I'll write a bunch, then stop cold, then edit a tiny thing a month later. I'm still shy about asking for feedback, so it ends up being a continuous, slow cycle of improvements before I can even think it's good enough to ask someone to check it.

Anyway, I finally got it the way I liked it, and then ended up self-deleting a few days later. I received valuable feedback that it was organized horribly, and people were divided on the silly ending. The contest, and working on 3031 got in the way after I made minimal progress. I got back to it, and while writing it it sort of got away from me. I decided to amputate the ending from the skip itself, and I'll probably put it into a companion tale instead (6 months and counting, and nothing). I'm happy with how it's developed, though.

SCP-3435 is probably my favorite thing I've written, tied with the slugs because they're sentimental to me. Anyway. I think the roots of this started when I read a skip (can't remember which) and someone had gone off on a tangent about how the skip was actually metaphorical for something completely unrelated, like a high school lit class. Combine that with an unwanted burst of politics in 19 one day, and my frustration led to me typing "skip idea: painting what punishes people who interpret it politically" (note: this isn't the exact quote, but no way in hell I'm digging through my mountain of chat logs for this right now).

Originally I just meant that line as a joke. Another user asked if they could use it, and that's when I selfishly realized I could have a lot of fun writing it up. It started out as a veiled rant against that sort of people. It became so much more.

The Ds were tough. They're people too, with childhoods and dreams just like anyone else. A lot of their dream parts are from dreams I've had over the years. I took inspiration from Zyn's Feels Bowl when I worked on that part.

I think the soul of this one was the interview between Gutierrez and Palanez. The anartist and the Foundation doctor. Two sides of the same coin. This was simultaneously the easiest and hardest part to write. I like the idea of a Fox and the Hound type deal in the Foundation. Two people, still connected despite being on different sides of the fence. The goal was to show that even though they are diametrically opposed, they are more similar than anyone would think. I believe that there's an alternate reality where Gutierrez is the one in the lab coat asking questions.

The effect is still there, but I think of this as more praising and less bashing. This site is an escape for me, much as Gutierrez finds an escape in his art. I read about the impossible here. The world of the Foundationverse is not the one I live in, and I like it that way. I do think over-analysis is dumb, though. Sometimes blue curtains are just blue. I enjoy movies like Pacific Rim.

All in all, this was probably the most meta, author-mouthpiece skip I'll ever write here. I wrote exactly what I already think; Gutierrez is me. Gutierrez is several of my friends over the years. Gutierrez is several of my acquaintances here. I'm sure there's a little bit of him in you too. Gutierrez is everything I thought I wanted to be when I was young. He's my childhood personified. He's the manifestation of the crayon drawings that hung on our fridge. He's the kid that played imaginary games with his friends and pretended to be superheroes or knights.

Story is nice, characters are nice, emotions are nice, worldbuilding is nice, but I came to this wiki for cool stuff and I've stayed for the cool stuff. Crystals that change you into quartz. World-destroyers in Jupiter. Cognitohazardous kidneys. And when the sun swells to a red giant and the solar flares finally kill the internet and this site, then the question "Are We Cool Yet" can finally be answered with a resounding YES.

SCP-3637 was something of an self-imposed challenge. If you go in order, my articles steadily get longer. This one clocks in at under 500 words according to Word, making it less than half the size of the next shortest. At the time of writing, this is the only one of my articles that doesn't involve people at all. There's no interview logs. There's no mysterious notes or logs left behind. There's no doctors bickering in the footnotes. Not a single person is mentioned by name here, and yet to me this one has the most emotion of any of my works. Sometimes simplicity is nice.

Let's see. I started out by noticing that for a partially-sci-fi site, we don't have that many dinosaurs, compared to say, cats, dogs, or other common animals. Dinosaurs are cool. Anyway, I wanted to do something involving a crystal dinosaur reanimating from the ground and being washed away by the rain over and over again. That was the core; no matter what, we gotta have a cycling crystal dino. (It was only after posting that I remembered that SCP-250 was a thing.)

FortuneFavorsBold majorly helped me out early on, and without that help it would have been some super dumb story that made no sense. Anyways, the concept of 'unfinished business' applying to a dinosaur mind, to paraphrase what FFB said, interested me. So what narrative would carry the concept? Motherly love and anguish sounded pretty good to me.

Maiasaura is one of the slightly more famous dinosaurs, but well known for the wealth of knowledge we have about its caretaking nature. It took good care of its little eggies. It's made of salt for two reasons, one being that there is actually a lot of salt out there, and two being that salt can represent tears and preservation if you're one of those people inclined to look for symbolism. I felt that the futility of the mother dinosaur endlessly walking, searching for long-dead eggs that aren't even nearby, was enhanced by the fact that she keeps coming back to life only to inevitably dissolve in the rain. Never-ending cycle, desperate even as she dissolves that maybe this time, this time she'll find her precious eggs.

From the start I wanted to write a Neutralized skip, and this was the perfect opportunity to do it. In breaking the loop, I wanted to add here that for once, the Foundation accidentally did something really nice, as compared to all the times they accidentally make things worse.

The date of the last Ramah event is 5/13/18, Mother's Day (at least in the US).

You know what, I've got more to say about this. I upvote all kinds of different stuff on the site. However, 3637 is close to the core of what I personally see as the quintessential SCP. I love it, not just because I wrote it, but because it has everything I like in an SCP (funny how that works):

It's short. Long stuff can be nice, but sometimes you just want that sweet little morsel.

It's understandable. No technical descriptions, no incomprehensible hard science. The only italicized term is 'Maiasaura' and you get a picture so you don't have to Google the dinosaur.

It can stand alone perfectly. No need for any prior or side reading, no deep and invested mythos.

It makes no sense. How the hell does a dinosaur get fossilized into a salt ghost?

It makes perfect sense. Everything is internally consistent. You understand exactly what the ghost wants and what happens when it gets it.

This one was tough to write, because I had a lot of pieces and not a lot of ideas on how to connect them all. A lot of fat got trimmed and left on the cutting room floor. Let me just, say, it's going to be a very long time before I try to write something interconnected again.

I am very proud of how well I concealed my lack of knowledge on the subjects involved through Wikipedia binging, so much so that at least one person asked about my nonexistent degree.

Not much to say about this one that hasn't already been said. I'm not 100% pleased with it but I don't have the time or effort to polish it more; at a certain point you just get tired of your draft and want to puke it up.

Oh god, the damn GRANT REQUEST. At the moment, this shitpost has beaten all of my other works on the site. I'm still working on how to feel about that.

Anyway, I do like Prometheus Labs. As a nerdy STEM undergrad, I consider them among my favorite GoIs here, but the titles of their formats, man. Linking one in chat pulls up this massive block of ALL CAPS. I've made idle jokes about "GRANT REQUEST TO FIX CAPS LOCK" and such a few times, and around May I started building up the number of in-progress tabs on my sandbox, so I decided to just make an empty tab titled "GRANT REQUEST FOR A REPLACEMENT KEYBOARD BECAUSE THE CAPS LOCK ON THIS ONE IS BROKEN" as a joke; just to put a smile on the face of whoever's critting one of my drafts or something.

A little while ago I figured, 'do we have any joke GoI formats?' Depends; you may or may not consider shaggydredlocks' black queen format the first. I decided to turn that joke tab into a full blown joke format.

I wrote the first two sections, then left it alone for a while. I decided early on I was gonna coldpost this sucker; and see if it lived or died. I came up with the escalation that morning, and added some more stuff to it. While editing the new page I added maybe a fourth of what's currently there. I finished it up, posted, and honestly thought it would either hang low or get downvoted.

I made SCP-3132 as a direct result of the Ideas That Would Never Work thread, and an agreement with TomatointheMirror. I love (to a probably anomalous degree) cracking my back, to the point where just hearing the sound of someone else doing it gives me placebo-esque relief, and from there I had my core anomaly. I wanted to capture the old feel of anomalies being plain unpredictable, defying anything close to a 'grand unified theory'. Probably didn't work as well as I had hoped, but ehh.

Nothing much more to say about the inspiration process for SCP-3536 beyond what I put in the author post.

This one's had a bit of a troubled production (even for me). I had the core of it drafted up by December, then was politely informed that my science was absolutely, hilariously wrong. I couldn't be bothered to deal with it at that time, and left the planned journal entries half finished.

Yeah, there were supposed to be a bunch of journal entries (woo cliche) and stuff detailing the group's descent into delicious, cytoplasm-y madness. A lot of RL Bad StuffTM and frustration later, and I finally decided 'screw it'. I took an ax to the draft, hacked away all of the unnecessary crap, and wiped off the blood. Then I posted it lukewarm.

It's definitely not perfect, but I'm very happy with it, if not with its undazzling reception. It's now my new shortest SCP article, and it manages to skim by without all that fluff that you see so often. I should do more skips like this one.

Right then. I saw that Day 1 of JamCon2018 had the prompt "Murder Mystery" and promptly quit. On the way home, I conceived a gag tale around the death of a major skip. And who's everyone's favorite punching bag? Yup. He even came with the perfect culprit, kaktus' excellent joke version.

Stayed up till about 1:30 am writing it, showed it to the first person I could wrangle to make sure it was funny to someone else besides me, and then posted it, self-upvoted, and went to sleep.

I'm happy with it. I never would have expected something like this to be my first posted tale but that's just how the cookie crumbles.

First things first: this is my new shortest skip at the time of writing, nearly exactly half the size of the previous title-holder, SCP-3536. So I'll keep this short. 3759 actually started out with moas (the extinct flightless bird) as the base, having a splinter group of them create their own moving island of safety by walking straight out of New Zealand. I then decided that tortoises > moas, and was able to remember the neat tidbit of Lonesome George's existence. I could still have my extinction haven, but I decided to make them ghosts. An earlier idea was that the entire island of tortoises would vanish when George finally joined them, as if they were waiting for the last one so they could finally pass on, but I rejected that as being both too sad and too similar to the story beats of SCP-3637.

"Terminarch" is a less-frequently used alternate to the scientific word "endling", meaning "an individual that is the last of its species", like the late George. I chose it because it sounds far more dignified and majestic compared to 'endling' which can only bring the term 'youngling' from Star Wars to mind.

Ramah. I had once promised myself I would never write anything else about 3637, but after flailing around trying to figure out what to write for Day 3, it came to me. Stormy = lightning + rain. 3637 had both of those. Once again, I stayed up till 2 am, got someone to make sure it didn't suck, and posted. I wanted it very surreal and abstract, and short. I think I nailed that, not sure. Never wrote prose like that before.

I don't really want to fall into one [niche].
And the idea of people not knowing what to expect when I write something, kinda makes me smile

I don't think I have a definitive writing style. Or at least, not one that can be determined from a sample size of three. As I mentioned in the tab above, I tend to write in bursts. I don't often follow the methods in the guides, maybe I should. I've only done "story first, object second" for 3031; the other two I had the objects long before I knew what I was going to do with them.

As for inspiration? I can't really answer that. I've had three ideas in a year of being on this site, two if you consider that the original seed for 2829 was created years before I joined. I think 3031 was my only true burst of inspiration, and even then it's heavily derivative.

If I had to describe the things I wrote under one umbrella, I'd say that I like remixing and building on established works, tropes, and themes. Seeing the great work posted here keeps me motivated to try to come up with stuff, even if I never actually manage to do so.